Former Sen. George McGovern, the three-time Democratic presidential candidate who won his party’s nomination in 1972 on an anti-war platform but lost in a landslide to President Richard Nixon, has died. He was 90.

A family spokesman said the former U.S. Senator died early Sunday morning.

McGovern represented his home state of South Dakota for more than 20 years, first in the House of Representatives and then in the Senate, where he championed liberal social and economic reforms.

“I accept your nomination with a full and grateful heart,” McGovern told conventioneers when he won the party’s nomination for president.

Gary Hart, who would go on to run for president twice himself, was McGovern’s campaign manager. And a young future president, Bill Clinton, ran his campaign operations in Texas.

McGovern, an unabashed liberal, called for an immediate end to the Vietnam War.

But he lost in a landslide to then-President Richard Nixon after winning just one state, Massachusetts.

[...]

Before entering politics, McGovern flew 35 combat missions as a B-24 bomber pilot during World War II and was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross. He married his college sweetheart, Eleanor, during the war, and they had five children together. Eleanor died in 2008.

He was tapped by three presidents to represent the U.S. at the United Nations on issues ranging from disarmament to world hunger. He launched a program with former Republican presidential nominee Bob Dole in 2002 to provide education and food to poor children in the U.S. and around the world.

“There is one problem that I think we can lick, absolutely, and that’s world hunger,” McGovern said at a 2000 press conference with Dole.

McGovern was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2000 and the World Food Prize in 2008.

He stayed active until the end, backing then-Sen. Barack Obama in the 2008 election.

“Let’s seize that opportunity and vote Barack Obama for a more hopeful world,” McGovern said at an Obama rally.

McGovern made no secret of his agenda in 1972: retreat from Vietnam, gut the military budget, redistribute the wealth, and drastically increase regulations on businesses. Because he was upfront with the American people about his plans to remake America into a European-style social democracy, he was slaughtered by Nixon. The left learned a valuable lesson from that lopsided defeat and developed an entirely new vocabulary to talk about liberalism, making it sound far more reasonable and accessible to the electorate. “Fairness” replaced “redistribution” while “spending” morphed into “investments.” The word “liberal” was ditched in favor of “progressive” as the left tried to connect to the turn of the 20th century reformists. During his 1984 run for president, McGovern eschewed the new vocabulary and was irrelevant to the race.

68 Comments, 28 Threads

1.
Josh

Way back in those days, you could be a liberal without being a total yutz. You might be wrong, you might be very wrong, but it was easy to credit many with good intentions, and some chance they might even be right.

RIP Senator.

One should also go back and look at Hunter S. Thompson’s “Fear and Loathing On The Campaign Trail 1972″ for much about McGovern, the campaign, and the eternal truths of politics.

I’ve believed for a long time that conservatives and libertarians ought to read FEAR AND LOATHING ON THE CAMPAIGN TRAIL just to get a better understanding of who and what they’re up against, just like they should read Alinsky’s RULES FOR RADICALS. It’s actually a fairly enlightening experience, even moreso (I imagine) if you lived through those same times on the opposite side of the spectrum.

Not quite, but in the chapter that serves as a retrospective on the DNC convention in Miami, Thompson prints a fascinating interview with Rick Stearns and a few of McGovern’s other top men, recorded on the beach a day or two after McGovern took the nomination, looking back at the procedural nuts and bolts of how they had just maneuvered their New Left platform around the Richard Daley/George Meany, Old Left contingent. It may answer a few of your questions. And, as I’ve said before, the whole book is an incredibly insightful look into the New Left at the moment of its initial ascendence, written by a journalist with a sympathetic if cynical eye.

(Thompson, to his everlasting credit, preemptively condemned the MSM’s eternal claims of objectivity as arrogant and false, and warned all of his readers that he made no such pretense. “With the possible exception of things like box scores, race results, and stock market tabulations, there is no such thing as Objective Journalism. The phrase itself is a pompous contradiction in terms.”)

George McGovern was a collectivist enabler.
He gave credibility to the Bolsheviks and Nihilists at a time that our country badly needed its young to ignore them.
We’re living in the social horror that resulted.
RIP? Yes. Let him rest for God’s sake! And give us peace from his like.

McGovern famously began to question the obtrusive regulations of government into the private sector after his experiences running a bed and breakfast in New England. But to the end he never connected the symptoms to the cause – i.e. he became a doubter of the regulations that has personally affected George McGovern, but as his support of Obama in 2008 showed, he never repudiated his own ideology or that of others who still supported that type of intrusive regulation.

Like Gene McCarthy in 1968, McGovern was a true believer in his cause, more because he thought it was right than because he saw it as a path to personal power for its own sake, as with the current White House occupants and his Chicago gang. Which made him a better person, even if his wrong-headedness would have simply moved Jimmy Carter’s results forward four years in the timeline if he had been elected president (as well as moving Reagan’s presidency forward to 1976), and we would today be holding McGovern up instead of Carter as the low standard for presidential achievement that the current occupant of the White House is challenging.

Nah, I bet a lot of the men in the B&B business are brow-beaten into doing it by their overbearing wives. I can’t think of anything I’d like to do less than waiting on strangers romping around my house.

Too, sorry for his passing, but I could have sworn McGovern checked-out in the 80′s.

In a three man race versus Nixon and Wallace, I voted for McGovern. I would do so again in the same situation. He seemed to be a good man and not out for fame and fortune or power. In hindsight, he was an extreme liberal/progressive for his time and few understood what that meant then. But hey, Nixon was not a conservative either and was very dislikeable as a person for reasons other than Watergate.

I worked for Nixon in ’72 (as a seventh grader), and I’m proud of it. (I was not yet a Republican; I worked for Democrats for Nixon.) McGovern was a southern isolationist like many of the Republicans of the WWII era. The reason the war ended badly is that there was a coup d’etat by the press and the Democrats (aka Watergate) and the far left completely took over the government, giving us much of the legislation we suffer under today, and dooming the poor people of Viet Nam, Laos, and Cambodia.

And yes, I grew up expecting to fight the Viet Name war, and had no problem with it.

Nixon was only INTENSELY dislikable to exactly the sorts of people I’d want to be disliked by. And besides, I unreservedly admire the rare sort of politician who–mirabile dictu!–doesn’t spend his life neurotically making himself agreeable to voters, reporters, and peers. It’s always been the likable ones you have to keep your eye on.

“But he lost in a landslide to then-President Richard Nixon after winning just one state, Massachusetts.”

He also won the District of Columbia. So while one can vote for Romney here, it’s in the bag for Obama and any “progressive”.

I’m ashamed to admit that, as a young and foolish college student, I voted for McGovern. It was only years later I came to realize that Nixon’s decision to resupply Israel during the October 1973 war would prove critical to its survival. Would McGovern have done likewise? I doubt it. (European states, we recall, wouldn’t even permit US cargo planes to land and refuel.)

Actually, that is the few things I have against Nixon. The US intentionally held off on resupplying Israel until the Syrians were almost in Tiberius. It was nothing short of a miracle that they did not break thorugh – there was nothign in fornt of them. (And I now live not all that far from there.)

As one who collects “Who saved Israel” theories, the most plausible is that it was Watergate that prompted Nixon; his hands were completely tied at this point and it was of the few places he could make a decision.

The US wanted Israel to “learn a lesson” and see defeat. The result was over 2,000 of our boys dead (out of a total population then of 4-5 million or so) and the potential for much worse than that.

Bob: You are no better than the leftist bomb throwers from other sites. McGovern was a good man, with the wrong ideas in my opinion, but he was a hero in WW2 as well. Pukes like you likely never served their country. Doom on you. Semper Fi

Wade C, while commenter Bob’s sentiment may me a tad crude.. one’s military background does not give them a pass for their less than admirable life, either.

If that was the case, Charlie Rangel espousing about his time in Korea for the millionth time (though I SWEAR its been more than that) to speak/cover up of his present-day graft/ theft/ race pimping he provides on a near-daily mic check.

All-in-all, the-late McGovern was an ideologically nitwit, bourgeoisie politician. For whom there are PLENTY from all 3 aisles.

If by that you mean “there’s honor among thieves” because McGovern was nothing more than a fence dealing in stolen goods. He had his minions steal from Peter to give to Paul. Any way you slice it, he was a thief.

It is the “fool the rubes”, do-it-via-the-backdoor element of the modern Democratic Party, as seen in the Age of Obama time and time again, that make me a particularly fervently anti-Democrat. As a citizen-owner of the Republic, you simply get the idea that when Democrats are in power, you can never stop worrying about “what’s next?”, and what the true agenda is. That’s why I like Republicans (among other reasons). I can go do something else for a while and not worry the nation will have been fundamentally changed–by fiat–while I was doing so.

George McGovern was deeply, seriously wrong on so many issues and failed to sufficiently appreciate the adverse consequences of his positions and worldview. Because he would have pursued a very damaging agenda, it is good that he did not attain the Presidency or have greater influence in our politics.

That may be the case, but there is no doubt that George McGovern was a good man, with high standards of personal probity and deeply honorable personal characteristics. Even his worst policy errors appeared to be resulting from naive misjudgments about the nature of the world and how people react to leadership and incentive structures. He was a true bleeding heart liberal, seeking to do good, but blind to the evil that can arise out of good intentions. His heroism in WWII led him to despise war and seek peace, usually regardless of the circumstances however.

Many people of all political persuasions have stories of the kindness and honesty of Mr McGovern, and he rose and fell without earning personal enmity or seeking wealth, celebrity, and cheap personal recognition. Our republic would be blessed to have more men of such character in politics. May he rest in peace.

I worked briefly on the McGovern campaign in western New York (full disclosure; we manned a phone bank at a brewery to pimp a McGovern visit, free beer was included) I met him and he seemed a decent man, not like the duplicitous swine most liberals are today. I cast my first Republican vote for president for the former host of the General Electric Theater in 1980. The only Democrat I have voted for since was a mayoral candidate in Huntsville, Alabama who later switched parties.

People like me are the reason Nixon won so overwhelmingly; 23, just out of school, recently married, job that wasn’t what I thought I’d be doing or deserved to be doing, living in an apartment with milk cartons and hand-me-downs for furniture – the stereo was the only decent thing we had in the house. Of course my wife and I supported McGovern, had a McGovern sticker on our fashionably foreign car. ‘Course, the fact that our parents supported Nixon was pretty much all the reason we needed to support McGovern. But, we couldn’t be bothered to actually go vote, only Presidential election I’ve ever missed since the first one I was eligible for in ’68.

First, I was born, raised, and still living in The South and the only Republican I’d ever heard a good word about was Goldwater, and no matter what people say now, the ONLY reason he carried the Lower South was his opposition to the ’64 Civil Rights Bill. Southerners weren’t then and really aren’t now ideological conservatives; they’re traditionalists, which sometimes looks the same as conservatism. In The South of those days only Blacks voted for Republicans and Damn and Yankee were still one word; there wasn’t much use for the Republicans liberal views on race and other social issues and the Party of Big Business thing didn’t earn them any support in a region that had always had a very skeptical view of capitalism. Voting for Nixon was a real step for a lot of Southerners and the odds were pretty good that a more traditional Democrat such as Humphrey would have carried The South in ’72 without Wallace in the race.

Nixon was the last of the Business of America is business statist Republicans with a big dollop of internationalism and anti-communism thrown in. Looking back, I think he gets a bad rap even on the wage and price freeze issue. Johnson had simply left a mess. Between the war on poverty and the war in Vietnam both “paid for” with deficit spending and borrowing, Nixon inherited an economy that was in a real mess by the standards of the day anyway. Romney is going to face some similar choices as well as he tries to clean up the Democrats’ mess.

It is lost now how hated Nixon was by the Left, and I don’t just mean the antiwar college kids and the appartchiks leading them, I mean the old true left who looked to the USSR for guidance and inspiration, and who still insisted that Hiss and the Rosenbergs were innocent. Watergate was the WaPo and NYT’s revenge for Nixon’s time with HUAC. Unfortunately, the disasterous elections of ’68 and ’72 and the aftermath of Watergate all but eliminated the Old Guard Democrats outside The South and left the path open for the Left to grab the switches and levers of the Democratic Party, the fruits of which we’re dealing with today.

That hatred make a lot of Americans very rich and was the proximate cause of the US purchase of Alaska.

In the 19th Century there was a great demand for Chinese tea, textiles, and porcelain, but there was little made in the West that the Chinese were interested in trading for, so they demanded specie, usually silver. Of course it was anathema to the mercantile capitalists of the day to spend precious specie in foreign countries. There was, however, one product the Chinese coveted; sea otter fur, a high-status, high-value product.

Sea Otters were found in Russian America; the Northwest Coast and Alaska, mostly Alaska. The Chinese, however, hated the Russians and would only trade with them at one place, an entrepot far up the Amur River. Since the Russians barely had the shipping to supply their colonies, they really couldn’t take advantage of the Sea Otter trade with China. Enter the Americans who had good relations with China and before the Civil War were still a major merchant maritime power.

The Americans built shoal-draft vessels that were seaworthy enough to get from Alaska to the Chinese ports and then back around the World and which could be operated with minimal crew. They left New England with rum, guns, staples, and trinkets and traded with the coastal indians and with the Russians for the precious Sea Otter fur. They then traversed to Pacific to China, principally Shanghai and traded otter fur for tea, porcelain, and textiles. They then sailed back westward calling on British India, South Africa, Europe, and on to America. A typical voyage lasted about four years and the average profit was 1200%. Crews worked on shares and everyone from the ship owner down to the ordinary seamen got very wealthy.

When the US bought Alaska for $7.2 Million in 1867, it is estimated that between the sea otter trade, whaling, and the nascent fishing industry, US interests recovered the money in the first year of ownership.

A friend of mine is a southern literature professor, we are Cali natives. At a party southern academics advised me that the south is not unlike Anglola or Bolivia where “foreign”/Yankee investment extracts minerals they feel are owned by the locals. I felt like I was in a bad movie talking to these guys who while quite eccentric are highly intelligent.

My friend advised me that these guys secretly advocate for an independent, agrarian confederacy. They write articles for southern lifestyle magazines harkening back to the good old days. They are careful to couch their racial opinions between the lines of their writing.

But the deck has been shuffled too many times. To many Yankees have moved down south. The south is no longer impoverished or culturally isolated.

“Southern Intellectual History” isn’t an oxymoron; there is a rich canon. The “Agrarians” usually refers to a group of Southern intellectuals of the ’30s and ’40s called “The Nashville Agrarians” who contributed to a work called, “I’ll Take My Stand.” It’s a good read even today. J.R. Cash’s “The Mind of The South” is probably the best place to start if you’re really interested, but I’ll confess to having tired of it all. The only one that actually interests me anymore is Eugene Genovese; he’s a Marxist, but he’s (well, was, he’s dead now) really smart and has a good view of The South. Try his “The Southern Tradition.” That book will illuminate my comment about Southerners being Traditionalists rather than Conservatives.

Indeed, Nixon’s wage and price controls were unforgivable and more than just stupid.

THIS is the reason our economy took such a blow that resounded through the seventies. It was NOT the Arab oil embargo. Embargos don’t work. The only way to keep someone you don’t like from buying your oil is not to sell it to anyone. OPEC countries cannot control who their oil is resold to or where it goes once the tanker leaves port.

Yes. People forget that the Democrat’s “dirty tricks” were retail. Just individual bums commiting vandalism.

Growing up in the “nasty part” of the 60′s, there was no temptation to be like our rock-throwing, chemistry-building-burning elders. We were prefectly cappable of commiting mayhem on our own, but we didn’t make believe it was part of a “cause”. I never admitted to being a “teenager” until I was 19.

The lack of constitutional constraint on politicians has doomed our old concept of disagreement between honourable gentleman.

That’s because the honourable gentleman elected can force the losing 49% of the electorate to all adhere to his every belief.

That is what is so very sad and fragile about our system.

And to be honest, we all know McGovern had a point about Vietnam but no point whatsoever with the rest of his drivel. In the country our great grandfathers gave us he would have had the power to end a war that in fact was never declared but not the power to carry out the rest of his innocent liberal schemes.

Sorry, but we don’t “all know” that. I think McGovern’s biggest drawback was his position on Viet Nam. Please remember that this was a popular position among the “beautiful people”. Only the “silly public” disagreed. Of course, the pbeautiful people then hammered away – mostly via the press, expecially using Watergate – until the public gave in.

Nothing wrong with the tone. I was not correct about ‘everybody, it was more a personal observation.

I always took the pro war side of the argument with my friends at school. But I dreaded the part where the other guy would bring up the point that this was an undeclared war, fought by people who were forced into the army against there will. So I see McGovern as more or less like my old hippy friend Chris asking me to prove that Vietnam was on the verge of invading travis county.

George McGovern was given the task by Hubert Humphrey of rewriting the rules for the Democratic Party, after Tom Hayden and his thugs tried to bust up the Democratic Party Convention in 1968. Humphrey wanted McGovern to rewrite the rules so that Hayden and his thugs could be “brought into the system.” Alas, the new rules made by McGovern let Tom Hayden et al. take over the Democratic Party, which is why the party became so bad. To think that the party of Harry Truman is now headed by Chicago crook Barack Obama!

Mr. McGovern was also a close and personal friend of Cuban dictator and tyrant Fidel Castro. McGovern’s true feelings and intent could be discerned from his love of Stalinist style communism in Cuba and the oppression of the Cuban people. He was dishonest in his portrayal of the true situation in Cuba. He was NOT/NOT a great American by any measure…

I’m afraid that McGovern’s WWII experiences formed his political obsessions in all the wrong ways. He operated out of an Italian airbase as a B-24 pilot and the legend is that witnessing the starving, suffering, war-racked local Italian populace endure conditions far worse than anything he had seen in the Great Depression fired his dedication to combat world hunger (by shoveling food shipments and money at third world hellholes rather than spreading the principles of property rights, free trade and the rule of law). He also had to make an emergency landing on the island of Vis in the Adriatic and spent a few weeks as a guest of Tito’s Red partisans and was apparently seduced by their worldview.

‘Resting’ in peace is a Christian concept possessing extensive biblical support in both testaments. Applied to the dead it is describing some sort of spiritual holding pattern or ‘sleeping’ until the Second Coming at which time all the dead will be resurrected for judgement. The people of Faith, and this goes back all the way to Adam, Eve, Cain and Abel, shall at that time enter God’s perfect rest for all eternity. The others will go to hell.

Very hard for me to imagine a man who supported abortion on demand and tolerated communism the way McGovern did belongs anywhere but in hell.

Does anyone know of a good book that examines what he did to the Democratic party’s nomination process that guaranteed he would be the nominee?

I know he captured the chairmanship of the rules committee or some party organization responsible for drafting the process by which it would nominate candidates, but HOW he did it and WHAT he did is seldom discussed. IMO because the Republicans chose to adopt similar changes, McGovern’s importance to the shape of the post-Vietnam political landscape for both parties may be underappreciated (in the sense of neglected by analysts, not in the sense of being grateful for what the twit did).

George McGovern was a man with good intentions as are most sincere progressives. I hope for the sake of his immortal soul that those good intentions aren’t paving any roads to the hereafter.

I cast my first vote in 1972. I came to regret my vote for Nixon (and even in the absence of Watergate, I would regret it), but I never regretted not voting for McGovern. I’ll say this for him, though, he despised Jimmy Carter. Apparently he and his entire immediate family voted for Jerry Ford. That showed some good sense.

“George McGovern was a man with good intentions as are most sincere progressives.”

That’s the Great Wall behind which he and his ilk want to hide. “Don’t judge us by our execrable results. We meant well, so judge us by our intentions.”

There comes a point when judging them by their intentions becomes a moral offense. Machiavelli had it right: results are all that matter. When you look at what they have done to blacks alone, how Dems/Progs have reduced them something akin to squalid slavery, all for the sake of replacing the white southern vote lost in 1965, considering the party’s history of hostility to blacks, you have to wonder if maybe they didn’t intend the results they got.

what is with all the sympathy for the devils? rip? really? rot for all the evil you did. might feel better to think you are being kind, but these people who have brought misery to this country and declared war on you and your children and your children’s children deserve the same respect that one would give to Nazis. They intend to make this country unrecognizeable, both libs and Rinos. there are plenty of nowaday enemies who once “served” this country, but they since turned into enemies (you to McCain) so enough with the war hero passes already.

“Indochina is devoid of decisive military objectives and the allocation of more than token US armed forces in Indochina would be a serious diversion of limited US capabilities.” (Joint Chiefs of Staff, 26 May 1954)

“The United States could not have prevented the forcible reunification of Vietnam under communist auspices at a morally, materially, and strategically acceptable price.” (The US Army War College Quarterly, Winter 1996-97)

Congress basically gave authorization for the Vietnam War with the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, a resolution based on ‘events’, part of which were highly exaggerated and part of which never happened. 50,000 more Americans then went on to die. “There is nothing new under the sun”.

I didn’t like Mr. McGovern. I didn’t vote for him. I didn’t like his politics or his associates but I never wished him harm. We disagreed, that’s OK, we get to do that. It’s still a free country at least for a while. I didn’t threaten to riot if he were elected, I didn’t threaten to pistol whip every long haired hippy I came across, I didn’t threaten his life. That would have never occurred to me because that’s not the way I function in my life.

Apparently however there are plenty of “twits” whose lives do function this way. They should be investigated and given the medication they need to function in society. Maybe Medicaid or Medicare could be extended to those who are a threat to the social order. This actually sounds like something McGovern would have embraced. Hmmmmmm.

Good damn riddance that McGovern is gone. Any candidate for the presidency who allows himself to be photographed standing in front of a Viet Cong flag while speaking at a “hate America” rally by war protesters – during the height of the war – deserves to lose by a landslide. He did, and he did.

My personal belief is that McGovern never really understood the forces that collected around him and their long-range intentions for the United States. McGovern would never have described himself as a “socialist.” I am sure he thought of himself as an old-fashioned “New Deal Liberal” with a strong isolationist streak. He was one of the last representatives of that old-fashioned Crolyite “progressivism” that dominated the “intellectual” left of the Democratic Party from 1900 through the 1950′s. This was a philosophy of high taxation and strict business regulation used to pay for various forms of social engineering. It also called for governance by “the best” people in society. (Think of Woodrow Wilson continuously telling you what to do “for your own good.”)

McGovern either consciously or unconsciously blinded himself to the realities of the New Left and their vicious totalitarian agenda. As difficult as it is to say he was simply a “useful idiot” for the emerging forces of the radical Left. (Franklin Roosevelt’s second Vice-President, Henry Wallace, was cut from the same cloth. So was Eugene McCarthy.)

George McGovern was a decent, generous and courageous man. That’s quite a lot but that is all he was. His politics were almost universally bad and he hurt his country by allowing himself to be used as a tool by unscrupulous idealogues who, even today, are bent on dominating every aspect of society.

McGovern may have been a nice fellow on a private level, but his political ideology required the full force of government compulsion to destroy our liberties. I do not celebrate the life of a politician who contributes to the desecration of freedom.

George McGovern was the only Democrat Presidential nominee I ever voted for – probably out of self-interest. I even went to a rally featuring McGovern’s second Vice Presidential pick, Sargent Shriver. (Senator Tom Eagleton got dumped but now has a big federal courthouse in St. Louis named after him.) McGovern lost miserably. Nixon won, was sworn in for a second term in January 1969, and I was drafted in February 1969, less than a month later. In 1970, I was in the Army (1st Air Cav) serving in Viet Nam, with occasional visits to Cambodia.

In later years, McGovern helped the Republicans defeat card check. Also, after going broke trying to run a California hotel, McGovern wrote the following words that Mitt Romney could quote to good advantage:

I wish during the years I was in public office, I had had this firsthand experience about the difficulties business people face every day. That knowledge would have made be a better U.S. Senator and a more understanding presidential contender. . . . We intuitively know that to create job opportunities, we need job entrepreneurs who will risk their capital against an expected payoff. Too often, however, public policy does not consider whether we are choking off these opportunities.

“I wish during the years I was in public office, I had had this firsthand experience about the difficulties business people face every day. That knowledge would have made be a better U.S. Senator and a more understanding presidential contender. . . . We intuitively know that to create job opportunities, we need job entrepreneurs who will risk their capital against an expected payoff. Too often, however, public policy does not consider whether we are choking off these opportunities”